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I have been waiting to read this book from the cover options were first shown on Twitter and now the day is here that I can tell you how I feel about Snare.

After a messy divorce, attractive young mother Sonja is struggling to provide for herself and win sole custody of her son. With her back to the wall, she resorts to smuggling cocaine into Iceland, and finds herself caught up in a ruthless criminal world. As she desperately looks for a way out of trouble, she must pit her wits against her nemesis, Bragi, a customs officer, whose years of experience frustrate her new and evermore daring strategies. Things become even more complicated by the fact that Sonja is in a relationship with a woman, Agla. Once a high-level bank executive, Agla is currently being prosecuted in the aftermath the Icelandic financial crash. Set in a Reykjavík still covered in the dust of the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption, and with a nail-bitingly fast-paced and chilling plot and intriguing characters, Snare is an outstandingly original and sexy Nordic crime thriller, from one of the most exciting new names in crime fiction.

First in the Reykjavik Noir Trilogy
International bestseller
Film rights sold to 66 Degrees North/Palomar Pictures

Like I said at the start, I have been waiting a long time to read this book. Let’s start with the cover, when I first saw it as one of the cover ideas it never entered my ‘innocent’ little brain that the contrails were very far from that and had it not been for my husband I would never have realised how interested I was. Don’t get me wrong, I was already intrigued but I wasn’t aware just how subtly the cover got inside my mind. I love simplicity, this cover has both that and complexity at the same time which is wonderful!

I have a thing, lately, where I don’t read the synopsis prior to reading the book. It had been a while from I had read it so had somewhat forgotten what it was about other than drug smuggling (thank you Rambling Mr. for enlightening me!) so essentially went into the story blind. As I read I almost felt that I was Sonja trying my hardest to do the best by my child even though I knew I was doing wrong. What we watch beautifully unfold is the urgency of a mother separated from her son and the lengths that she will go to to get full custody. I felt her fears, her longings, her love, her desperation… none of which could have happened without Lilja Sigurdardottir’s prodigious writing style.

I can be sceptical about reading a translated novel as they don’t always portray the emotion within the story but here we are and I have to say that Quentin Bates has done a wonderful job. He has given us a translation that is both smooth and eloquent.

I want to thank Anne Carter and Orenda books for inviting me to be part of this blog tour and supplying me with my review copy.

Icelandic crime-writer Lilja Sigurdardóttir was born in the town of Akranes in 1972
and raised in Mexico, Sweden, Spain and Iceland. An award-winning playwright, Lilja
has written four crime novels, with Snare, the first in a new series, hitting bestseller lists worldwide. Translation rights have been sold in eight countries to date, and film rights have been bought by Palomar Pictures in California. Lilja has a background in education and has worked in evaluation and quality control for preschools in recent years. She lives in Reykjavík with her partner.